Articles tagged "Francophone Literature"
Insularity, Mobility, and Imagination: Writing from the Indian Ocean
In early March 2011, two news items about Mauritius landed in my inbox almost simultaneously: one, a glowing article in the U. S. news magazine Slate, titled “The Greatest Country on Earth,”…...
Center of Flacq
At the first rays of dawn, when the dogs abandon their posts and the vagrants their cardboard boxes, the most pointless of prayers ascends into the sky. A plea. God, grant us this day our daily bread .…...
The Iron Caterpillar
Strange phenomena can strike such dread into human hearts that I ask you to believe in the one that knotted the stomach of the young diver named Paolo, who noticed the haze of the tunnel when he was returning…...
Traces of Our Fathers
Writer, journalist, and filmmaker Alain Gordon Gentil has recently finished shooting four documentaries that retrace the great Indian, African, French, and Chinese adventure of immigration to the Mauritian…...
The Sea Horses’ Ball
Below the Mipham plane the Himalayan sky. The wind florifies the snow. Fa-fa-mi . . . mi-fa-fa . . . Shadows gain in luxuriance, tufts of omphalodes and orthosiphon. Don’t stay grounded.…...
Moorings: Indo-oceanic Creolizations
Moorings (amarres in French), in Reunion Island Creole a profoundly polysemous term, also means link, ties, enchanted, bewitched, to be in love, to be enraptured, to be bonded, to care (amar lë…...
Famine
Frogs invariably proliferate in a flood. My countries, crass latitudes and borders of hell, often encounter these blessed times. Winds and rains. Frogs. Toads. Pelobates and other pelodytes. Inflated…...
Kratos
From my face made puffy by the swelling of centuries my shithead laughter, I gaze at you from my manure where negro death unfolds in mass, crater bodies in rotten piles, pink abscess on vagina in bloom,…...
Abdellah Taia’s “An Arab Melancholia”
Abdellah Taïa is Morocco’s highest profile gay writer, a point underscored in the accompanying blurb to his recently translated An Arab Melancholia. Since the book is billed as an autobiographical…...
It was a November of bitter rain and snow blackened by use
we filed the dead leaves by size to ease the task of the forest that was absent for reasons known only to itself The parents had left with the door We mistook puddles for creeks pebbles…...
God, the mother claimed, is behind every tree in the forest
his right shoulder lower than his left heavy with rocky snowfalls from such endurance It’s his motionless breath that fissures our walls in the night when one winter hands power over…...
Dead
the mother looked like the linden tree in the square like the wood of the table on which she wrote our faces like the log that didn’t sweat or complain about the smoke dead she began to avoid us…...
As night became talkative
we were lent a window on a fragment of the world We we re the house and the road that led to the house The mother moved the door each time a train went by and at each procession toward the…...
Her apron drawn on her skin
the mother sent us out in the street naked Walnut husks served us for ink Fences we’d jumped were the pages we leafed through Euphoria in the evening when she multiplied her arms two to embrace us…...
How to find the mother when her face disappeared behind the hills
How to find the mother when her face disappeared behind the hills leaving us a body without contours two packets of cold for the armpits white grass for the pubis Gone off with her friend the fire…...
The Ark
I shall destroy man whom I have created from off the face of Belgium: both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them. Make thee an ark…...
The World is Moving Around Me
My Nephew I stepped out into the yard with my nephew. The little shacks on the other side of the ravine stood up to the earthquake. The old wall collapsed. We sit on the hood of the car. “I’m…...
from “La Belle Amour Humaine”
There are seven hours of road between the noise and the silence. Between here in the capital and Anse-à-Fôleur. I suppose it's the same where you come from, one town after another and…...
from Three Dreams on Mount Meru
Today, in the year 1170 of the Hegira, as I finish the narration of my journey to Mount Meru, I can't help thinking about Omui. He was the best storyteller in all Mombasa. The fabulous stories he would…...
from African Psycho
I I have decided to kill Germaine on December 29. I have been thinking about this for weeks—whatever one may say about it, killing someone requires both psychological and logistical preparation.…...
Barking
I am a dog. Who else but me can acknowledge it with such humility? Because I don't blame myself for anything, "dog" becomes no more than a word, a name: it's the name men have given me. But there…...
from The Butcher’s Aesthetics
The two friends' meetings resembled a ritual that went back to the years of holy struggle when they would drink more cups of coffee than they could count to give them energy, a small vice Laid Touhami…...
Bloodred Dew
The two men were alone now. Or was it two women? The night stretched on endlessly. So did the mountain. And the frosted sky lying lightly over the mountain began to pale. The mountain stood facing them,…...
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